Abdullahi had a round, chubby face, an unusual thing in a Somali, and a self-effacing manner, behind which one guessed weighty latent reserves. He was a loyal servant to the house, particularly pleasant to me because he was personally so clean and neat, and because I found in him a rare talent for gratitude. His individuality first manifested itself in an unexpected skill as a chess player. He stood by, quiet as a mouse, while Denys and Berkeley, who both considered themselves superior players, sat by the board. When questioned he told them that he knew the game of chess, and when, experimentally, they took him on as an opponent, he played in unbroken silence and almost invariably won his game. Later on I found him to be a talented arithmetician as well. Denys had left an Oxford book of mathematics in the house. If I read out to Abdullahi one of its problems: ‘Divide up a number in four parts, so that the one part plus 4, the second part divided by 4, the third multiplied by 4, and the fourth part minus 4 will produce the same result,’ he sank into a kind of dumb ecstasy, and the next day would bring me the solution without being able to explain how he had arrived at it.

When Abdullahi had been at Ngong for a year he confided to me his passionate ambition to go to school. I felt it to be in a way legitimate, but since there was no Mohammedan school in the Highlands, I should have to send him to the Islamic school in Mombasa, and at the time I could ill afford to do so. When I told him: ‘I have

Abdullahi

not got the money, Abdullahi,’ he took in the fact resignedly, but from time to time, on an evening when Farah was not in the house, he came up to ask me: ‘Have you got more money now, Memsahib?’